A sustainability scoring system to assess food initiatives in city regions

The City Region Food Systems approach has been proposed to achieve food system resilience and nutrition security while promoting the urgent ecological transition within urban and peri-urban areas, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the great diversity of the initiatives composing City Region Food Systems in Europe poses barriers to the assessment of their integrated sustainability. Hence, the present work is developed within the EU-H2020 project Food System in European Cities (FoodE), to build a consistent sustainability scoring system that allows comparative evaluation of City Region Food System Initiatives. Adopting a Life Cycle Thinking approach, it advances on existing knowledge and past projects, taking advantage of a participatory process, with stakeholders from multidisciplinary expertise. As a result, the research designs, and tests on 100 case studies a simplified and ready-to-use scoring mechanism based on a quali-quantitative appraisal survey tool, delivering a final sustainability score on a 1–5 points scale, to get insights on the social, economic, and environmental impacts. As in line with the needs of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the outcome represents a step forward for the sustainable development and social innovation of food communities in cities and regions, providing a practical and empirical lens for improved planning and governance.